If I was a US intelligence agency I would specifically establish colocation presences with ISPs in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, china, etc, on commercial ISP terms, and admin the servers remotely to set them up as a commercial vpn service. There's plenty of datacenter operators in Russia that will take your money.

> There's plenty of datacenter operators in Russia that will take your money.

Wouldn't they have some uncomfortable questions to answer when Putin finds out they've been cooperating with the Feds?

Presumably the feds wouldn't say who they were and would pose as common criminals, because they wouldn't have any reason to suppose that the datacenter operator would keep quiet if they were open about their identity.

But yours assumes that Russia doesn't do counter-intel and wouldn't be looking for exactly these kinds of infiltrations. If it is obvious to us that these things would be targets, I'm pretty sure it is obvious to Russian intelligence services.

Bellingcat appear to routinely buy data from Russian blackmarket data brokers.

Replace 'buy' with 'receive' and 'Russian blackmarket data brokers' with 'intelligence assets' and you're correct.

Shady fly by night data hosting doing counter-intel, or better, Putin spending his precious rubles on running counter-intel ops for shady fly by night hosting companies, are both hilarious.

Russian govt has always held counter intel to be a top priority and they devote an enormous amount of resources towards it, so why is that hilarious?

The feds would pose as a slightly shady hosting/Colo company or similar.

First-order strategy (do something that works as long as the other side hasn't also thought of it) only works until the other side thinks of it. My guess is that the intelligence complex (CIA +) thought of this around 1995, and the domestic law enforcement complex (FBI +) around 2005.